It looks like Apple got themselves into a little hot water by selling pirated books on the AppStore. The Chinese courts ruled that Apple has to compensate eight Chinese writers and two companies a total of $165,908 US dollar to make amends for their little oversight.

While the courts did find Apple guilty as charged, the writers and companies were not very happy with the ruling as they originally sought $1.6 million in damages. They claim that the copyright infringements resulted in much larger losses.

"We are disappointed at the judgment. Some of our best-selling authors only got 7,000 yuan. The judgment is a signal to encourage piracy," Bei Zhicheng, a spokesman for the group, told Reuters.

Apple pledged it does its best to protect copyright. "We're always updating our service to better assist content owners in protecting their rights," Apple spokeswoman Carolyn Wu said.

While it does seem like the courts should go after the people who pirated the material in the first place, perhaps this is just a little Karma given their propensity for suing other companies.

Apple's just not having a lot of luck with courts at the moment as they had to pay over $9 million to settle a dispute over the iPad trademark in China and has also been spending a lot of time in court with Samsung over patent disputes but has failed to get Samsung's smartphones banned in the US.

Even though it has nothing to do with the story, this is a good time to post a picture from Apple Maps as picking on Apple for that debacle just never gets old. Perhaps I am just allowing myself a little schadenfreude, but we here at NextPowerUp reserve the right to indiscriminately pick on anyone.